Horace Dediu wrote about what it means to be great.

What makes a product great? I struggle with this question because being great is not just being better than good. Greatness is to goodness as wisdom is to smarts. Just like getting smarter and smarter may never make you wise, getting better and better does not mean ever becoming great.

Greatness is transcendental. It’s hard to pin down. It inspires debate. It divides as much as it unites. It creates emotions as much as thoughts. It builds legends. It engages and persists. It lives in memory and penetrates culture. It implants itself in our consciousness persistently, to linger and dwell in our minds while we are bombarded with stimuli.

[…]

In the absence of any measurement of greatness, how do we spot it? It may just be down to “knowing when we see it”. But not everybody does.

This quandary came to mind when looking at the performance of the latest iPhone, the 6S. Observing it closely, we lose sight of it. We see only minute changes between versions; marginal changes which can’t be weighed. And yet these changes have a more important attribute: they are absorbable. A change that is ignored is not only valueless, it may actually destroy perception of value. It creates clutter and confusion. A change that is absorbable is valuable. It is meaningful.

[…]

Paradoxically, the improvements are not usually things that users ask for. Surveys always show that consumers want “better battery life” or a “bigger screen” but delivering something else entirely which nevertheless leads to mass adoption shows an uncanny insight into what really matters. Indeed, those who deliver only what customers ask for end up marginalized and bereft of profit.

Great piece by Horace Dediu. Not everyone can recognise and appreciate greatness when it first appears.

CNBC reported on top analyst saying early Apple iPhone 6S sales were weak.

Here’s why he believes iPhone demand is weaker…

1. Google search volume much lower than last year:

iPhone 6S search volume is 75 percent below last year’s iPhone 6 and 25 percent lower than even the iPhone 5S according to Google Trends, said Hargreaves.

Could this be a sign that less people are using Google search?

For those who are unaware, iPhone opening sales broke records and are up 30 percent over last year.

Seth Godin wrote about ad blocking.

This reinforces the fundamental building blocks of growth today:

• The best marketing isn’t advertising, it’s a well-designed and remarkable product.
• The best way to contact your users is by earning the privilege to contact them, over time.
• Making products for your customers is far more efficient than finding customers for your products.
• Horizontally spread ideas (person to person) are far more effective than top-down vertical advertising.
• More data isn’t the point. Data to serve explicit promises is the point.
• Commodity products can’t expect to easily build a profitable ‘brand’ with nothing but repetitive jingles and noise.
• Media properties that celebrate their ads (like Vogue) will continue to thrive, because the best advertising is the advertising we would miss if it was gone.

We have become so numb to advertising that most of us unconsciously ignore the ads when we browse website. Ad blockers just help us save bandwidth by not loading the ads and protects our privacy by blocking tracking by ad networks.

Dave Mark wrote on The Loop about CNET blocking content from readers using ad-blockers.

One more reason not to visit CNET.

Secondly, that they would make such a move speaks a lot about the amount of traffic that iOS brings to their site.

Ars Technica reported on Google’s own researchers challenging key Android security talking point.

Throughout the resulting media storm, Google PR people have repeatedly held up the assurance that the raft of stagefright vulnerabilities is difficult to exploit in practice on phones running recent Android versions. The reason, they said: address space layout randomization, which came to maturity in Android 4.1, neutralizes such attacks. Generally speaking, ASLR does nothing to fix a buffer overflow or similar software bug that causes the vulnerability in the first place. Instead, the defense vastly decreases the chances that a remote-code-execution attack exploiting such bugs will succeed. ASLR does this by loading downloaded scripts in a different memory location each time the operating system is rebooted. If the attacker can’t locate the malicious code, the exploit results in a simple crash, rather than a game-over hack.

On Wednesday, Project Zero researchers tested a home-grown stagefright exploit on a Nexus 5 device running an Android 5.x version. The results showed that at best, ASLR will lower the chances their exploit will succeed. Meanwhile, Joshua Drake, the security researcher who first disclosed the critical vulnerabilities in the code library, said Android ASLR does even less to prevent a new custom exploit he has developed from working.

John Gruber on the Daring Fireball about the iPhones 6S.

The glaring downside to this tick-tock schedule is that we as a culture — and particularly the media, both on the tech/gadgetry side and the business side — are obsessed with “new”. And, well, the S-model iPhones don’t look new. This year there is a new rose gold aluminum finish, but at a glance, the iPhones 6S look like last year’s iPhones 6. Every year is an iterative improvement over the previous one, whether it’s an S year or not. But it’s hard not to see the S years as more iterative, less impressive, updates, simply because they look the same.

I think that’s a trap — a way to be fooled by your eyes. If you put aside what the phones look like, the S model years have brought some of the biggest changes to the platform. The display changes came in non-S years, of course — the iPhone 4 going retina; the iPhone 5 expanding from 3.5 to 4 inches diagonally and changing the aspect ratio; and of course last year’s 6/6 Plus expanding to 4.7 and 5.5 inches and higher display resolutions. But it was the 3GS that first improved on CPU performance and gave us the first improvements to the camera. The 4S ushered in Siri integration and a much faster camera. The 5S was Apple’s first 64-bit ARM device, years ahead of the competition, and was the first device with Touch ID. For a typical iPhone user on a two-year upgrade cycle, I think the S years are the better phones, historically.

Something that Matt and I agree with and often talk about.